Ernest Hebert's five-novel Darby series has been hailed by the New York Times as a "vigorous saga...splendidly imagined." In fictional Darby, New Hampshire, Hebert has created a vividly engrossing literary landscape where those consigned to the rural underclass--"the shack people"--struggle to survive in a rapidly changing society. Prominent among the town's illiterate uncouth outsiders are the Jordans, featured in two novels from the series A Little More than Kin and The Passion of Estelle Jordan. The Kinship brings these two books together in a single volume. A substantial new essay by the author explains how and why he came to write about the shack people.

In 1746, Nathan Blake, the first frame house builder in Keene, New Hampshire, was abducted by Algonkians and held in Canada as a slave. Inspired by this dramatic slice of history, novelist Ernest Hebert has written a masterful new novel recreating those years of captivity.

Set in New England and Canada during the French and Indian Wars, The Old American is driven by its complex, vividly imagined title character, Caucus-Meteor. By turns shrewd and embittered, ambitious and despairing, inspired and tormented, he is the self-styled “king” of the remnants of the first native tribes that encountered the English. Displaced and ravaged by disease, these refugees have been forced to bargain for land in Canada on which to live. Having hired himself out as interpreter to a raiding party of French and Iroquois, Caucus-Meteor returns from New Hampshire the unexpected possessor of a captive, Nathan Blake.

He decides to bring the Englishman to his own village rather than sell him to the French. Ambivalent about his former life, Blake gradually fits into the routine of Conissadawaga. Meanwhile, Caucus-Meteor struggles to protect his people from the rapacious French governor. Constantly plotting and maneuvering, burdened by responsibility, the Old American exhibits cunning and courage. A gifted linguist who was forbidden to learn to read or write; a former slave who is now a king; a native leader who has seen more of London and Paris than his English captive, who knows more of European politics than the French colonial administrators, Caucus-Meteor is a brilliant, cantankerous, visionary figure whom readers will long remember.

The struggle between the indigenous rural working class and the upper crust intensifies in this final Freddy Elman novel. The son of the town trash collector and Lilith Salman, daughter of a prestigious family, embark on their ill-fated love affair. Seeing Darby through new eyes, Freddy comes to realize that "the kind of people who hunkered down among these tree-infested, rock-strewn hills" is "dying out, replaced by people with money, education, culture...."

"The Kinship includes A Little More Than Kin and The Passion of Estelle Jordan, the second and fourth novels of the five-book series revolving around the imaginary town of Darby, New Hampshire. Upon writing the last sentence of A Little More Than Kin, I knew the story of Estelle Jordan had had to be told before the Jordan saga was complete. I brooded upon this matter all the time I was writing the third Darby novel, Whisper My Name. I'm glad that the two Jordan books are now where they belong, together, and that I have some space at the end of The Kinship to tell the story behind the story."

From the apparently placid suburbs of Connecticut to the violent streets of the Bronx, from the decay of America's rust belt to the sunny optimism of the wide-open West, Web encounters other "mad boys" like himself -- deranged by the widespread collapse of moral values and angry at an older generation whose insatiable desire for instant gratification has left these children to fend for themselves.

Howard, anti-hero of the first Darby series, battles against encroaching change that symbolizes the class conflict between indigenous Granite Staters scratching out a living and citified immigrants with "college degrees and big bank accounts."